ters, where certain
islands are nodal points which have given and received of races and
culture through centuries of movement. The original white population of
Uruguay differed widely from that of the other Spanish republics of
South America. Its nucleus was a large immigration of Canary Islanders.
These were descendants of Spaniards and the native Guanches of the
Canaries, mingled also with Norman, Flemish and Moorish blood.[153] The
Norse on their way to Iceland may have picked up a Celtic element in the
islands north of Scotland; but from the Faroe group onward they found
only empty Iceland and Greenland. This was an exceptional experience.
Early navigation, owing to its limitations, purposely restricted itself
to the known. Men voyaged where men had voyaged before and were to be
found. Journeys into the untenanted parts of the world were rare.
However, the probable eastward expansion of the Eskimo along the Arctic
rim of North America belongs in this class, so that this northern folk
has suffered no modification from contact with others, except where
Alaska approaches Asia.

[Sidenote: The transit land.]

The land traversed by a migrating horde is not to be pictured as a dead
road beneath their feet, but rather as a wide region of transit and
transition, potent to influence them by its geography and people, and to
modify them in the course of their passage. The route which they follow
is a succession of habitats, in which they linger and domicile
themselves for a while, though not long enough to lose wholly the habits
of life and thought acquired in their previous dwelling place. Although
nature in many places, by means of valleys, low plains, mountain passes
or oasis lines, points out the way of these race movements, it is safer
to think and speak of this way as a transit land, not as a path or road.
Even where the district of migration has been the sea, as among the
Caribs of the Antilles Islands, the Moros of the Philippines, and the
Polynesians of the Pacific, man sends his roots like a water plant down
into the restless element beneath, and reflects its influence in all his
thought and activities.

[Sidenote: War as a form of the historical movement.]

Every aggressive historical movement, whether bold migration or forcible
extension of the home territory, involves displacement or passive
movement of other peoples (except in those rare occupations of vacant
lands), who in turn are forced to encroach upon th